


we cannot hold mortality's strong hand

by watfordbird33



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-20
Updated: 2017-03-20
Packaged: 2018-10-08 02:59:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10376358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/watfordbird33/pseuds/watfordbird33
Summary: So here's how it feels.It feels like he’s on fire and burning to death. And it feels like there’s a knot in his stomach. Like mashing his fingers against the keyboard, swoujksbnugoefbdcjk. It feels like pressure behind his eyes because he’s always not-quite crying, always a step away.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from King John, by Shakespeare. Act four, scene two, line eighty-two.

So here’s how it feels.

It feels like he’s on fire and burning to death. And it feels like there’s a knot in his stomach. Like mashing his fingers against the keyboard, swoujksbnugoefbdcjk. It feels like pressure behind his eyes because he’s always not-quite crying, always a step away.

He doesn’t think in words, but then it turns out he does. The same phrase, over and over.

He says, he thinks, I’m so in love with her.

 

Yeah, and she’s ginger hair. She walks the hallways with this flare of her hips like she’s a bad girl acting good or maybe a good girl acting bad. 

Knot in his stomach, fire in his throat. He teases her because he’s not sure what else to do. Doesn’t even notice her eyes until junior year and then, goddamn, he’s falling again--falling even though he never hit the bottom in the first place. 

He spams her with smiles and hearts and she tells him she hates him. Thinks maybe it’s flirty but it’s not. He dissolves. Mashing his fingers against the keyboard, dwuogajcsbznxwhjscx. He tells her he’s in love with her and she just laughs.

 

Oh, but she’s these long slim limbs and so much fire and grit that it’s hard to keep her in check. He’s seen her smoking cigarettes on the corner, met her at a party once and she’d drunk enough cheap beer to put a grown man on his ass, but she was standing just fine, looking at him. Weaving a little but that lights-out smile. He wants her smile all the time.

 

He’s a fucked-up mess and he knows it.

Too long staring at her auburn hair and too long falling again and again and again and again. He doesn’t think in words but his soul’s blistering up and maybe that’s enough.

 

Kiss me.

Fuck you.

That, too.

I hate you.

I love you.

What is your fucking  _ problem? _

 

She comes to school with cigarette burns on the ends of her fingers. And a hole put through her Imagine Dragons shirt.

Asks her what she did and she says, none of your goddamn business, James Potter. Leave me alone and get out of here.

He thinks for a minute, walking home with that pressure behind his eyes, that he’d love to, he’d love to, he’d love to be free of it all. But then again maybe not--rounding the corner, watching her hips sway, her skin through the rag of her torn shirt. Because oh, Lily Evans, green eyes and tongue of flame. So bright. She burns him up and she’s the fire love is fashioned after. 

 

Too late to fall anymore.

And yet he’s texting her at midnight and they’re having a conversation and he might be out of his mind.

Down, down the rabbit hole.

Too late (to climb back out).

 

**james:** ily

**lily:** so youve said

**lily:** many many many many times

**james:** :)

 

She runs the booth selling prom tickets. If you buy two, she’ll paint your nails, and everyone in school who’s seen green eyes and tongue of flame wants to have their hand pinned down by Lily Evans.

James makes her paint his red.

Then he holds his hand up against her hair and smiles and she rolls her eyes but that was a smile, he saw it, mashing his fingers against the keyboard, dqwhusbjnheuojbdniphwdqlsnijdpw[odjw ks and oh  _ fuck, fuck,  _ he loves her too much to let her go.

 

She falls in love with him slowly. It’s a long road because happy endings come at a price. A long road, a romance novel, even though he doesn’t have the kind of abs that could be featured on the cover. But they smile in the dark at each other anyway. They write their own story. A flower on the cover, bending towards the sun. No guarantees. No promises, just light.

 

And:

 

**james:** go to prom with me

**james:** please

 

They’re eighteen and insane and James’s nails are still faintly red from a week ago. Ride the ferry to Seattle and he puts his arm around her but she shrugs him off. He matches his nails against her hair and raises an eyebrow at her because he knows she liked it, smiled, the weight of his arm on her shoulders and her skin.

 

Yeah, and she’s golden. She’s the most alive of any of them. Washes the ash off her fingertips and offers him a cigarette, and later, dancing in the lobby, he holds her close against him, slim and fiery and bright.

He wants to live in this moment. Wants to swallow his joy and keep it in between his stomach and his chest, love her love her  _ love  _ her and he really can’t go on.

Afterwards they ride the ferry back and he puts his arm around her. This time, she lets him stay.

 

They fall asleep on each other’s pillows. Eighteen and insane.

He tells her he’s in love with her, and her smile arrives. It travels more and more frequently, nowadays. Usually one-way.

 

**james:** love feels like 3huiqfjenduhh2hbw

**james:** like cigarette burns

**james:** like ur hair in the sun

**lily:** love feels like fighting

**lily:** constantly

**james:** how unromantic

**lily:** love feels like falling

**lily:** like when ur standing beside someone taller than u

**lily:** like 

**james:** like this

**james:** {sent a picture}

**lily:** like that

 

So close to eternity.

But happy endings never come without a price.

Gets the call on a Monday and he doesn’t even remember how to drive so he runs until he’s breathless and bloody and his feet are rubbed raw in their dark Converse, the ones with the toes she’s written all over, nonsense, her name and his and smiley faces and hearts.

Tell me something to reassure me. Tell me lies.

He thinks he might actually have said that, but he doesn’t remember. It’s foggy in his bedroom and the air clogs up his lungs. He holds his phone and writes ouhqwdjksr3ouhefkjdihowqjs3hfqj, lilyflower, lily, oh my sun.

 

Hospital smells like bleach.

He holds her hand.

 

Turns out their story was a tragedy, one of Shakespeare’s, turns out they’re small and broken after all, and their love was just a little lie. Love’s just a factor: always got to come before the end. He cries so hard he runs out of tears and then he rides the ferry back and forth telling his lungs to breathe to breathe to just fucking stay alive. 

(The brain stem, she says, studying at his table, looking at him with her bright green eyes, is in charge of involuntary functions, and he says,  _ shit,  _ looking at his notecards, because he can never remember that one.)

 

Three weeks ago she taught him how to braid. Swung her ginger hair over her shoulder and showed him where to divide and plait and lift. When he was done, her hair lay in this tangled, three-part mess. She laughed and told him he was hopeless and then she kissed him til he couldn’t breathe, grabbed his face and pulled him down to her and wrote letters on his back, love, love, love, love, fucking love and what it’s done. Their fucking tragic end.

He discovers that Shakespeare is an ass.

 

At night he smokes cigarettes one after the other, dumps the butts in his pockets and leans on his windowsill all out of tears. 

She says, don’t smoke so much.

And he says, you taught me.

He takes her hands (her fragile freckled lilyflower hands) and turns them over and looks at her palms. Scarred with burns. She’s never careful enough. He kisses each burn one by one.

She says, you’re an idiot.

And he says, I love you so much it hurts.

And then his cigarette burns down and she just disappears.

 

**james:** lov hfeels like ur emty & brken a d u just keep hoping fr sumtbhng but thrs nothn thr

 

Falls asleep on the ferry one day and when he wakes up he’s covered in flowers. Fucking drowning in them.

Thinks it’s another dream until he sees the notes.

_ I’m sorry for your loss. _

_ She cannot be replaced. _

_ I’ll pray for you. _

He gathers up every stem and petal, every card folded crosswise and vertical, slanted child’s writing and neat adult’s, and he holds them in his arms. He gets off the ferry fucking  _ covered  _ in this love. 

This love, this endless love.

 

Hamlet. Act one, scene five, line seventy-six.

_ Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin, _

_ Unhousel'd, disappointed, unanel'd; _

_ No reckoning made, but sent to my account _

_ With all my imperfections on my head. _

 

She says, you need to move on.

And he says, I will never move on.

 

Because he still sees her in the way the light comes through his windowpanes at night. In the fire on the hearth. In the ferry, the benches, the deck, the patch of floorboard where he slipped his arm across her shoulders. In his cigarettes and the burns that adorn his hands.

He loves her like leaving. Like falling into place or out of it.

She’s not a good girl or a bad girl, or one trying to be another. Just a girl. Just this fiery nymph of a girl, lissome and endless and always leaving, leaving, leaving when his cigarette burns down.

 

**james:** love feels like a run-on sentence

**james:** and losing it feels like grammar

**james:** or maybe just like shit

 

Two years later, twenty and nearly too late (but not; he climbed out of that rabbit hole), he goes to college in Connecticut. It’s almost a relief, to be so far away. There are no ferries but he still puts his cigarettes out on windowsills and tells his lungs to breathe.

They breathe. He breathes. 

And oh, but he endures.

 


End file.
